On The Wings of Heroes by Richard Peck Read Free Book Online

“That’s what he’s got left.”
    We watched Scooter up to his porch. The all-clear sounded, and the world came back. The streetlamp on our corner showed us the way home. Lights in porch ceilings came on, buzzing fishbowls in yellow halos, all the way to ours.
    â€œWe’re going to have to look out for Scooter,” Dad said.
    â€œHow come?”
    â€œHis dad’s taking up a commission in the navy.”
    â€œScooter never said.”
    â€œMaybe he’s not ready to,” Dad said. And I remembered the snazzy Schwinn that Scooter got last Christmas. It could have been his dad already saying good-bye.
    I leaned into my dad the rest of the way.
    â€œWhen you’re taller than I am,” he said, “are you still going to stick this close to me?”
    â€œSure,” I said. “Why not?” So he threw an arm around my spindly shoulder, and we went on home. Mom was pulling a towel off the Philco, and a song welled out: “When the Lights Go on Again All Over the World.”

Now the Government Wanted Milkweed . . .
    . . . to replace something called “kapok” from the Malay Peninsula. Milkweed was for stuffing in life jackets, to keep shipwrecked sailors afloat, or pilots who’d ditched at sea.
    At the tag end of summer the stuff was bursting out of its pods along every country road, and Scooter and I wanted to be outdoors till the last second before school. We’d already scooped up enough scrap metal to get us into the Varsity Theater through all next year and into 1944.
    Last summer the park was the size of our universe. But the bikes pushed out our boundaries. We fell off them and got crossways in traffic. I’d crashed down a culvert and sprung the frame on mine. But we’d been almost to Maroa and Mt. Zion on secondary roads. Sacks for the milkweed hung off our handlebars and caught the breeze.
    We were out past Wyckles Corner one blazing morning so close to September you could smell school. There was milkweed, tangled with ragweed and goldenrod. We’d just bumped our bikes over a blue racer snake, dead in the road with a red smear where a car had run over its head.
    Before Scooter got any ideas about tying the snake to his back fender, I wanted to put some distance between it and us. The road was ankle-deep in dust, so it was uphill pedaling the whole time.
    Back in the fields stood a ruined old barn with a Red Pouch Tobacco sign flaking off its side. A falling-down barn and then an old sloping house. You could see daylight through both of them. Deep in weeds up by the house was a beat-up 1933 Chevy sedan with suicide doors. It had a license plate, but it looked pretty weary.
    There was a mess of milkweed, but we liked the look of the spooky old barn. The doors were off it, and I thought we could see enough from out here in the lot. Snakes could be in there out of the sun, snakes with swaying heads. Copper-heads. We looked inside, then looked again.
    In the middle of the dirt floor were the remains of an ancient automobile, striped with sunlight, furred with dust. An old jalopy like the mummified corpse of a car in this rickety tomb of a barn.
    â€œNeat,” Scooter breathed, and walked his Schwinn inside. He parked it against a support beam, so I had to. A row of rusty rattraps hung webbed together down the post.
    The car had been old when Packard built Dad’s. Even the chicken droppings on it were older than we were. Wooden-spoke wheels. The tires were long gone, and everything had lived in it at one time or other: chickens, hogs—snakes, no doubt. The crank was still in the slot under the radiator.
    Anything this historic had to be a treasure. Scooter smeared spit on the radiator cap, and the nickel winked—nickel, not chrome. He rubbed an emblem, and the faded letters read: PAN AMERICAN.
    The hood was missing, and generations of animals had been nesting in there, living in messes of their—
    â€œSomething ate the